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Z-Hire and Z-Term Review

Administrator are faced with less – less time, less resources, etc- – and the obvious solution is automation. This rule seems to apply whether you’re a consultant or work the day to day grind for a corporation; with automation freeing up your time is a way to get your high priority tasks completed.

That’s where the tools like Z-Hire and Z-Term come in handy. You can check out the tools here. Z-Hire is for on-boarding or new employees, while Z-Term is for off-boarding or for employee termination processes. What is nice is the cross functional appeal of the tools. You can make a process to create an AD account, Exchange Mailbox and Lync account all from one place. This helps re mediate an issue administrators have had with the split permissions model implemented by Microsoft when AD and Exchange were unlinked in management tools.

So what can these tools do for you?

Z-Hire
The purpose of Z-Hire is to allow the IT department to on-board a new employee. Using a template system ZHire is a cookie cutter process for creating employees in AD with Exchange, Lync, Office 365, and SalesForce standard settings.
There are two sections to the configuration of the templates – Environment and User.

EnvironmentUser
What’s useful here is that we can create some simple templates that include relevant information for AD, Exchange and Lync as well as providing some flexibility with Custom Scripts. These templates can make populating values for your users a quick process as well as providing a way to reduce human error when it comes to data entry in general.

Once a template has been completed, you need to save the template and then close and reopen the tool. The reason for this is that settings are stored in an XML file on the server and needs to be loaded by the applicaiton. The XML file looks something like this:
After all of your settings are entered for the template, make sure you click on File –> Save Configuration.

The logging provides a way to confirm your steps were completed as expected.

As noted in other reviews, some groups are not filtered in the tool when looking up which groups to add the user to.Z-Term
Terminations/Cleanup. One of the more tedious parts maintaining an IT environment. Removing user access to systems like Exchange, Lync, etc.
Z-Term helps with this cleanup. With the template system employed by the tool automating and standardizing the termination of the user is made easier.
Some examples of what can be done for cleanup:

Disabled the user account

Move user account to a special OU

Remove group membership

Reset AD Password

Change Distribution List ownership

Forward emails to another user

Export mailbox to PST

Etc.

I personally find features like the Distribution List ownership change, exporting the mailbox to a PST and forwarding emails to another user quite useful as I deal with a lot of customers using Exchange. These steps alone are a great time saver. There are also settings to wipe their mobile device (Active Sync only).

** NOTE **
The two applications can be easily moved to another server by simply copying all the files in the directory where you put Z-Hire.

In the end I find tools like this another strong step in the right direction. You may not be able to configure everything from just ZHire, but it can take some of the tedious burden of new user administration as well as user termination. This would be a good tool for Administrators who need a tool to configure users with Exchange, and or Lync features.More Information
Download the tools here.
Download the documentation here and here.